* When campaigning to oust Joe McCarthy from office, Sauk Prarie Star editor Leroy Gore apparently used this Crosley CC station wagon to promote the cause. The Minutia blog has more on the story.

* David Szondy’s Tales of Future Past is a treat for any retrofuturist, but even more so for the car-obsessed retrofuturist, with writeups on cars like the 1961 Simca Fulgur.

* Over at the Garage Blog, Gary Grant has an intriguing writeup on Bob McLean’s Comstock Racing Ford GT-40, which crashed at Sebring in 1966. Legend says it may have been buried near the track at Sebring, so Gary puts on his gumshoes to try to get to the bottom of the story.

In the book Jeep The Unstoppable Legend, author Arch Brown quotes AMC historian John A Conde. “…On the way back from the Texas State Fair several years later, the truck carrying the model flipped over, caught fire and the XJ-001 was lost forever.”

The Simca Fulgur was designed by Robert Opron who designed the Simca 1100,the first car to have FWD and a hatchback like the VW Golf of 1974. He also went on to design 3 seminal Citroens,the GS,SM and CX.. He then left Citroen for their arch rivals Renault.

Interesting, the XJ-001. Looks like it was well on its way to being a proof of concept of all-wheel-drive for performance on-road driving. Still, I’m not completely sold on how a modified Jeep chassis/drivetrain would do on the street, nor the XJ-001 as an off-road vehicle for anything other than fire roads. Since its running gear is pretty well documented, that may be why no one has reproduced it. That or the more likely answer that anyone who would own a possible donor Jeep is probably real interested in it as a classic Jeep.